The professional news page of Ernest W. Adams, author of The Designer's Notebook.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Keynote at Swansea Animation Days conference.

Swansea, Wales

Swansea Animation Days, also called SAND, is a conference put on by the University of Wales to discuss computer-generated animation. It's not a festival (they do show films but they don't give awards), nor does it deal with hand-drawn animation -- the real emphasis is on CG animation. One day this year was artificial intelligence, and they asked me to come give a lecture the day after the JISC CETIS conference. I took the train down from Manchester at night, slept late, and showed up just in time. Although it's a fairly old lecture by now, I gave them "Putting the Ghost in the Machine," which turned out to be very well-received. (It's hard to go wrong when you start your lecture by reciting "Old Ironsides".) Later there was a fabulous Chinese dinner at which I got to sit next to Ruth Aylett from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, who's doing some interesting AI work for games.

The next morning I sat on a panel chaired by Ed Hooks of "Acting for Animators" fame, to discuss story in games. I'm afraid Ruth and I rather dominated the discussion, as we're both pretty passionate about the subject, and the other panelists were comparatively quiet by comparison. As soon as the panel was over I had to charge off to catch a train to Cardiff Airport for a flight to Finland...

About Me

Dr. Ernest Adams is an independent game design consultant, writer, and teacher. He has been in the game industry since 1989, and is the author of Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design with Joris Dormans,Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition, andBreak Into the Game Industry: How to Get a Job Making Video Games. Ernest was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions on theDungeon Keeperseries, and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on theMadden NFL football product line. He is the founder of the International Game Developers' Association, and is a popular lecturer at the Game Developers' Conference and many other events.